As a brand-new julia programmer, I am striving to tidy up my $HOME dir in order to avoid bloating it up with a tons of dotfiles, and at same time, define sane paths to julia using XDG Base Directory Specification. The steps defined in the Official instruction will generate the dir ~/.julia, which is rather unpleasant... So I am trying a way out to this problem following sane UNIX path definitions.
After reading the julia's environment variables and some discussions about it, I hit the bullet and tried to organize it in the following way (probably not the most optimized, so help me):
Firstly, I decided to put the extracted julia/ directory inside $XDG_DATA_HOME as it is user-specific data files, right? So a ran
mv julia-1.7.2 $XDG_DATA_HOME
The julia's documentation ask me to define the path to julia's bin/ dir as an env variable $JULIA_BINDIR. To do so, I defined in ~/.profile:
# The absolute path of the directory containing the Julia executable -> ~/.local/share/julia-1.7.2/bin
export JULIA_BINDIR="$XDG_DATA_HOME/julia-1.7.2/bin"
The documentation also ask me to put the julia bin in the $PATH. Hence, I symlink
ln -s $XDG_DATA_HOME/julia-1.7.2/bin/julia ~/.local/bin/julia
because User-specific executable files shall be stored in $HOME/.local/bin. This resolve the problem of putting the julia into the $PATH as long as ~/.local/bin is in it.
I would also like to put the data and config file of julia into $XDG_DATA_HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, respectively, which matches with the XDG Base Directory Specifications. So I added in my .profile the following env. variables:
# relative julia's data directory -> $JULIA_BINDIR/$DATAROOTDIR/julia/base -> ~/.local/share/julia/base
export DATAROOTDIR="../.."
# relative julia's config files -> $JULIA_BINDIR/$SYSCONFDIR/julia/startup.jl -> ~/.config/julia/startup.jl
export SYSCONFDIR="../../../../.config"
Both $DATAROOTDIR and $SYSCONFDIR are relative paths to the data directory and configuration file directory, respectively. With these environment variables, I am pointing the data dir at $XDG_DATA_HOME/julia and the config dir at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/julia. To have such directories in theses paths, I symlinked again
ln -s $XDG_DATA_HOME/julia-1.7.2/share/julia $XDG_DATA_HOME/julia
ln -s $XDG_DATA_HOME/julia-1.7.2/etc/julia $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/julia
Moreover, I put the Julia history into $XDG_STATE_HOME as that path should be used to store "logs, history, recently used files", but I barely see UNIX users using this dir. I just added to .profile the following line
export JULIA_HISTORY="$XDG_STATE_HOME/julia"
At moment, when I open up julia on terminal in REPL mode, my computer does not generate ~/.julia/ (thanks God), but I bet my way have flaws, so any contribution is welcome.
Thanks in advance.
